208
MARGE PIERCY
He told me that both he and his shrink agreed I needed help badly,
was frigid (I no longer wanted to sleep with him) and pursuing
neurotic fancies. I stood there flat-footed and suddenly I could see
the cramped, starved, supportive housewife relationship with my
husband side-by-side with earlier, freer bondings with other men,
and I started to laugh. He tried to tie the divorce to my being
willing to go to his shrink or a shrink his shrink would choose, but
I just left. I am surprised considering how timid and malleable I
was then where the strength emerged to laugh and walk out, to
cling to my own flimsy reality against official reality, husband
reality, shrink reality, newspaper reality, sociological reality, the
reality of everybody I knew telling me I was a self-destructive fool
to walk out of such a good marriage. Good for what, I asked? I
think only a hunger for reality, a large omnivorous curiosity that
had led me to a certain breadth of experience by twenty-two gave
me a courage based on having at least some few things to compare
other things to.
That comparison was generally lacking: a sense of possi–
bilities, of alternate universes of social discourse, of other assump–
tions about what was good or primary, of other viable ways of
making a living, making love, having and raising children, being
together, living, and dying. There was little satisfaction for me in
the forms offered, yet there seemed no space but death or mad–
ness outside the forms.
II.
Femininity as a persistent discomfort, like a headcold
Surely seldom has the role of women been more painful, the
contradictions more intense, than they were in the fifties, when
the full force of the counterrevolution struck us. Sick was a cant
word of the fifties: if you were unhappy, if you wanted something
you couldn't have easily or that other people did not want or
wouldn't admit to wanting, if you were angry, if you were differ–
ent, strange, psychic, emotional, intellectual, political, double–
jointed: you were sick, sick, sick.
Women's clothing of the fifties, the purchased or stolen trap–
pings of my adolescence: a litany of rubber, metal bands, garters,
boning, a rosary of spandex and lycra and nylon, a votive candle
of elastic, I consecrate to you. I think you were sick.
I
